smoke and mirrors
by Summoner Luna
Summary: She could be happy here, but she cannot remember where she is supposed to be. In the distance, she hears the closing of a door. [Rinoa, Julia, Time Compression.]


The song is one she's heard before.

It is not her mother's song, but her mother has played it many times. It is slow and mournful, and brings forward images of darkness, of despair.

Here, there is only darkness and despair.

Rinoa is in a new page of Time when she hears it. She is not searching for this era, because Squall will not be here, could not be here, but the low rhythm calls to her from the dark reaches of time compressed, and she pauses in memory, just long enough for the movement of ages to slow, and then to stop.

She is in a place she does not recognize. The great room of a mansion, or perhaps a museum; crumbling walls and dust and debris over what was, at one point, a formal checkerboard floor. Fog slides across the tiles and curls around her ankles like sea grass, and she hears the sound of glass beneath her boots, shards scattered from a broken chandelier.

Rinoa walks with the slow rhythm of the piano towards a dark corner, counting the notes between her movements. _Step, two three, step two three, step two three…_ The dust and fog swallow the echoes of her footfalls.

She stops just on the edge of the shadow to listen, and to decide. Squall is not here. She is searching for Squall. She should turn, should leave, should find him—

The piano—or pianist—smells like roses, and the smell combines with the high notes and reaches into her and squeezes her heart, and Rinoa hears a door shutting somewhere far across the room. She can see more clearly now, her eyes used to the barely-present moonlight that shines in from windows on the high ceiling, and she moves around the piano, brushing a broken clock to the side with her foot before she takes a seat on the edge of the piano bench and watches her mother play.

Julia's arms are thin in the dark room, thinner than Rinoa remembers, and her eyes are hidden behind hair and shadow. Rinoa wants to touch her: to rest her head against her shoulder, feel her mother's fingers lace with hers, to sit with her legs curled close and her head against her mother's chest, but the music is intoxicating and she does not dare interrupt.

The room grows colder, as the song nears its end. Across the body of the piano Rinoa can see the fog growing thicker in the ruins of what was once a beautiful room. It swells and reaches into the corners, and when she looks down it is stretched like cotton on the ghostly face of the clock.

The last note of the song hangs in the air and Rinoa reaches for her mother's hands, and Julia does not know her touch.

"Mom?" she asks, and tries again, reaching her arms around her mother's thin shoulders, leaning around to see a face that only grows darker in the shadows. "Mommy…it's me. It's Rinoa. Do you remember me?"

Julia reaches forward, strains against Rinoa's grip towards the keys to start the song again, and Rinoa holds tight.

"No, mom—please—"

—the fog around them grows stronger—

"Just _look_ at me—"

—and Julia turns, and her face in the darkness is terrible; hair hanging off white bone with holes for eyes, and when she opens her mouth a dry scream spills out with a storm of black rose petals that fill the air. They spin around Rinoa and she flails and fights against them, and loses her balance entirely and falls backwards. She crashes into the clock and feels the glass splinter against her legs, her back, her hands when she reaches out to catch herself—

—and a thin arm reaches down for her.

"Rinoa," her mother says, in the voice Rinoa has spent her life imagining. In place of bone and shadow her face is soft, and there is recognition in her eyes. "My little Rinoa. You grew up."

"M—mommy?"

Without the background sounds from the piano the silence in the room is thick. Rinoa remembers hearing a door close earlier, and she cannot see into the rest of the room from the dark corner where she fell.

"I'm sorry I had to leave you for so long. I'm so sorry. But I'm here now."

Julia kneels beside her, arm still outstretched, and brushes her fingers against Rinoa's face. Rinoa leans in, and the smell of roses is back. If she closes her eyes, she can make the room disappear. She can bring them somewhere else, somewhere safe, without pieces of broken glass and shadowy corners where her mother is a skeleton and she is left bleeding a corner—

"That's better," Julia says, and Rinoa opens her eyes to her childhood bedroom. She blinks in the lamplight, so bright after the dim non-light of time.

 _Time?_

"You look beautiful, honey, but I wish you'd gone with a longer skirt," her mother says, and Rinoa looks at her reflection in the large mirror in the corner. She is wearing an ivory dress that falls mid-thigh, with satin straps that wrap around her neck. The dress is far more mature than anything she expected to be allowed to wear, and she watches her mother's reflection step closer towards her. "I guess I still just think of you as a little girl."

Rinoa frowns. The dress is beautiful, and Julia has styled her hair as she has always done her own. Rinoa has been told her whole life she looks like her mother but this is one of the first times she can see it for herself, can see herself as anything other than a child against the elegance and grace of her mom. She wants to be happy, to savor this moment she has longed for, but something is _missing._

"I'm not a little girl, mom," she says instead. Automatic. Scripted. It's just what you say, right?

"You'll always be my little girl," Julia says. Her reflection smiles, and Rinoa cannot bring herself to turn to her directly. "But you're missing something. Wait here."

She leaves, rose perfume staining the air in her wake, and Rinoa walks closer to the mirror. She is supposed to be doing something, going somewhere. Meeting someone. But surely that's what the dress is for? She smooths the fabric over her hips, turns and looks at herself from the side. The dress really is flattering. If only she could remember why she was wearing it.

"Here. You've asked about them for so long, and tonight feels like the perfect night for you to try them out."

Julia returns with a square box, and when she opens it, Rinoa draws in a breath. "But mom—"

"It's a special occasion. And you're old enough, now. I know they'll look beautiful on you."

Julia hands her the earrings, and Rinoa looks down at them, and then back to the mirror, watches her mother fasten the necklace. Julia's fingers brush against her skin and they are ice cold, and Rinoa tries not to shiver. She has admired so much of her mother's jewelry, but none more than the pearl pendant she was wearing the night of the—of— _of what?_

"Are you happy, Rinoa?"

Her mother smiles behind her and Rinoa watches them closely. She still can't place exactly what is off, or why she is dressed up, or where she is going, and she is certain there is a clue in the mirror.

She sighs, and brings a hand up to touch the pearl pendant—and feels instead two rings, hears them _clink_ together, and with the sound, their reflections change. The color drains from Julia's skin and her dress turns from rich garnet to the red-black of thick blood, to nothing but shadow, the soft ivory of Rinoa's dress into a blue duster, dirty and blood stained and fraying at the hem.

"You could be happy here, Rinoa," Julia says, the same harsh, dry voice that she screamed with only moments before. Their reflection is distorting, melting, blurring them into one.

"No. We can't." She finally turns around, and the face on her mother's body is her own, sunken and skeletal. Her hair hangs in strings in front of her face, and she wears a rusted, empty chain around her neck. Rinoa reached out and grabs the chain and pulls, and it turns quickly to dust, and takes the mirage of her old room with her. "We have somewhere else we need to be."

The other her fades into blackness, interrupted only by tendrils of fog that reach for her, and the off and on strains of a piano, soft, melancholic. Somewhere in time Julia Heartilly plays a song she never wrote, alone and in shadow, and Rinoa's heart breaks for her, for herself, for what they never got to have.

 _I'm sorry I had to leave for so long._

"It's not your fault, mom," she says to the darkness, and stops where she is and grabs the rings around her neck. She brings the small, plain band to her lips, and whispers, "It's not your fault."

Light returns. She is out of her old room, out of the open hall where her mother played, and on a stretch of barren rock, at some unknown point in time, and she is going to find Squall here, she's certain of it.

She takes a step, and catches the faint scent of roses, and slowly the mournful piano starts to fade.

* * *

 _Inspired by an image by GeoArcus at dA (now#3 is the image title). As soon as I saw it I immediately thought of the end of the movie What Dreams May Come (which is my favorite movie ever, at least visually), but as I was writing it accidentally strayed a little in Labyrinth, but both of those movies have aesthetics that work with Time Compression, so I guess it's no surprise I attempted to combine them. I feel like the pacing moves a little faster than I would like for it to, and I'm not sure how successful I am at creating creepy atmosphere, so feel free to point out any glaring issues with this and I'll see if I can tweak it._

 _Also, the song Julia is playing is Moonlight Sonata. If you heard something else that works too, but that's what I was hearing her play while writing it._


End file.
